Small Intro

Andrew Hutchings (aka LinuxJedi) has worked on many of the Open Source software projects that make up the Internet. He now works from home in the UK for MariaDB developing their MariaDB ColumnStore engine.

All views / opinions on this blog are his own and not necessarily those of his employer or anyone else.

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Tag: Linux

Gource is a tool which can take a source code tree and create beautiful visualisations out of it. I’ve used it a few times before for various projects. This weekend I spent a little bit of time playing with it and applying it to MairaDB Server to see what it would produce.

My go-to Linux distribution when I’m setting up my workstations is Fedora. I have been using it since Fedora Core 1 and RedHat 9 before that. I can’t even remember what RedHat version I started with now. I often try other distributions out and sometimes use them for a few months but I always end up jumping back to Fedora.

Fedora defaults to the Gnome desktop environment so I have used Gnome as my primary desktop environment for many years. Again I’ve tried others such as Cinnamon and XFCE but I always end up back in Gnome. In recent months I’ve heard a lot of good things about KDE Plasma so I thought I would give it a shot for a week. This is a report of my findings.

All software has bugs. Even if you could possibly write the perfect bug free software all the layers down have bugs. Even CPUs as can be seen with the recent Meltdown and Spectre bugs. This means unfortunately sometimes software will crash. When this happens it is useful to capture as much information as possible to try and stop it happening again.

One of the first things I did when coming back to work from the holiday break is code a new crash dump handler to be used in MariaDB ColumnStore. This will spit out a stack trace for the current thread into a file upon a crash. It is very useful for daemons to try and find the root cause of a problem without running through a debugger. Continue reading Coding and decoding crash dump handlers

Sometimes network protocols don’t entirely behave as documented. Other times there is no documentation at all beyond code. Either way you can sometimes find a need to sniff the traffic of a connection to find out what is really going on.

My day job requires me to spend a lot of time in Linux terminals, hammering away at MariaDB ColumnStore to write and test new code as well as finding and fixing bugs. I have decided to write about the tools I use to get the job done, especially newer ones I have discovered.

There has been a lot of talk in the Open Source world about universal package formats. Specifically the big two, Flatpak and Snap packages. My current Linux desktop distro of choice, Solus, has recently announced support for them. Now, this has a lot of pros and cons and whilst I have seen and heard a lot of the positive points I want to put across what is probably my more unpopular point of view.